Champagne Ritual, Made a Little Less Intoxicating

This postseason, the baseball clubhouse has seen a twist to its ritualized, made-for-television Champagne celebration: the ginger-ale spray.

Twice now, Texas Rangers teammates of Josh Hamilton, the tattooed slugger whose team is in the World Series opposite the San Francisco Giants, have doused their most valuable player contender with soft drinks instead of the Champagne they kept for themselves in a separate celebration.

It was a respectful acknowledgement of Hamilton’s sobriety after a past of drug and alcohol abuse.

Now Major League Baseball is making its latest attempt to crack down on the alcoholic version of those celebrations.

Last week, on the eve of the World Series, the league quietly issued new guidelines to teams, said Rob Manfred, M.L.B.’s executive vice president. Teams must limit Champagne; offer a non-alcoholic version; beer and other types of alcoholic drinks are banned; and teams are not allowed to bring the drinks on the field.

Hamilton’s ginger ale bath is a sideshow to what has become a choreographed ritual of baseball, one that increasingly causes purists to cringe at the over-the-top emotion they see as unsportsmanlike, and serves every autumn as a reminder of the enduring and sometimes ugly place alcohol has had in the baseball culture, stretching back to the 19th century when the precursor to the American League was known as the “beer and whiskey” league.

Dr. Bobby Brown, who enjoyed more subdued clubhouse parties during his playing days with the Yankees in the 1940s and 1950s, tried to persuade teams to substitute ginger ale for Champagne when he was the president of the American League in the 1980s and 1990s. He had received complaints that the celebrations set a bad example for children.

“It’s very hard to change things in sports,” he said.

As commissioner, Vincent also tried to curtail the celebrations, but said he was never able to rally support among the players and owners. “We had no real success,” he said. “The sadness is that no one thinks this is very important.”

Baseball, Vincent said, has always had its share of men “who are serious alcoholics,” and a new biography of Mickey Mantle attests to the demons faced by one of the game’s greatest players. So Vincent does not view the separate dry ritual for Hamilton necessarily as a sweet moment of team caring.

“I think it’s a sad witness to the fact that for some of these guys, alcohol is a serious problem,” Vincent said.

After his ginger-ale soaking after the Rangers’ pennant-winning victory over the Yankees, Hamilton told reporters: “Hopefully, it will set a precedent for sports teams. Don’t flaunt it. We’re role models.”

Photo

The Rangers used soda in their celebration out of respect for Josh Hamilton, a recovering alcoholic.Credit
Jeff Haynes/Reuters

There is precedent for Hamilton’s experience. In 1999, the Yankees celebrated with a non-alcoholic version of Champagne out of respect for their recovering teammate, Darryl Strawberry. Other scenes were incongruous. Last season the Angels doused the jersey of their teammate Nick Adenhart, killed earlier in the season by a drunken driver, with beer. The Tampa Bay Rays player Willy Aybar, who has been through alcohol rehabilitation and has spoken out about sobriety, was sprayed with alcohol after the team clinched a playoff spot this year.

And the Champagne-spraying, goggle-wearing revelry that marks victory at each postseason stage often occurs in clubhouses that are otherwise dry, the result of an inconsistent crackdown in recent years on club-provided alcohol that began after the 2007 drunken-driving death of Josh Hancock, a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals. Roughly half of baseball’s 30 clubs forbid alcohol in clubhouses during the regular season, according to Manfred. That group includes the Yankees, the Mets, the Cardinals, the Twins, the Athletics and the Nationals.

“Considering the lengthy tradition of baseball and alcohol consumption, as well as the clubs’ support for the postgame buffet and bar, it is only a matter of time before an intoxicated player injures an innocent third party,” the article said.

But the postseason celebrations are more about spraying alcohol than drinking it. “I think if they were limited to milk, they would have a milk ritual,” said Jim Bouton, a pitcher for the Yankees in the 1960s who is highly critical of how the present generation of ballplayers celebrates success.

The alcohol aside, another chief complaint from critics like Vincent and Bouton is that the celebratory displays seem procedural and routine — in the way workers seal the clubhouse in plastic sheeting, hand out Champagne bottles and goggles and championship T-shirts and hats, which then go on sale to fans, turning the party into more of a marketing tool than an act of exuberance.

“It has become this sort of horribly staged event,” Burns said. “They were at one point spontaneous but have become de rigueur.”

Bouton said the news media and team owners “have corporatized and commoditized the celebration.”

The series-ending celebration has become a news media event with greater participation by the fans than in previous generations (it is common now for players to bring Champagne on the field). In 1997, for the first time, the champion Florida Marlins were presented the championship trophy on the field instead of in the clubhouse.

Yogi Berra, veteran of 10 Yankees championship teams, recalled in an e-mail that players usually saved the Champagne for the team party at the Biltmore Hotel. In the clubhouse, he said: “It wasn’t as wild as today. We had a couple of beers, Ballantine, I’m sure.” He added, “I know George Weiss wouldn’t have wanted us to waste so much Champagne,” referring to the team’s general manager at the time. “He was pretty tight.”

But press reports from the time suggest the old celebrations might not have been much different from those of today. After the Yankees beat the Giants in the 1936 World Series, an Associated Press reporter wrote, “the Yankee marauders blew their vocal gaskets in a wild dressing room celebration today.”

Soon enough, a television audience will watch another wild celebration that may, or may not, include ginger ale.

A version of this article appears in print on October 31, 2010, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Baseball Rite, Still Bubbly but Less Intoxicating. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe